The USA Memory Championship is happening right now, over in New York. Wish I was there - a Canadian TV company were looking for something to make a programme about and I dropped some heavy hints that the best thing for them would be to fly me out there, but they didn't bite. It's always a lot of fun, and it's good to see that they've amended the rules to allow for the possibility of two or more competitors perfectly remembering two packs of cards in five minutes - I remember the days when no Americans could come close to doing a single pack in that time; now there's the possibility of a play-off with three minutes, and then thirty seconds!
Judging by the pictures and tweets they've posted on Twitter, the eight finalists include Nelson Dellis, Chester Santos, either Ram Kolli or someone who looks a bit like him, and several people I don't recognise. I really do wish I was there to watch the finals and cheer them on! My money's still on Nelson to win...
There's also rumours vaguely fluttering around the internet that there's a Slovenian Memory Championship happening today, but I know absolutely nothing about it. It's probably in Slovenia, but that's not a great help; I can't really point to Slovenia on a map with any degree of accuracy. I'm sure it's a great competition, though!
Next Saturday there's the first Italian Memory Championship, in Rome. I extra-double-wish I was going to be there, but I haven't got any money. There are prizes, that would just about cover the cost of the trip, more or less, if I did go there and won, but that's a bit of a big if. Anyway, the Saturday after that, it's the Welsh Memory Championship, in Llanover! And that I will be going to. I'm a lot more prepared than last year, although admittedly that's not difficult. It's great to have competitions everywhere! The memory season is here!
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Compare the adverts
Normality reasserted itself well and truly on the final day of the othello, with me losing all three games horribly - I'm meaning to write at greater length about it and othello in general, just as soon as I feel like it, but tonight I'm distracted by another subject. Those Compare The Market ads with Robert Webb completely destroy the suspension of belief
... that's weird, I'd got that far into writing when someone posted a comment asking how the final day of the othello went. I must be some kind of future psychic! Maybe I will write about othello tonight after all...
The fun of othello, you see, is analysing your games on WZebra, the computer program that knows everything about othello, after the game. The modern generation of young othelloists immediately pull out their iPhones or whatever and check to see what moves they got right and wrong, whereas old codgers like me wait until they've got home to their old-fashioned laptop computers. It tells me that there wasn't some kind of awesome game-winning move that I missed against Emmanuel C, that in fact we were basically neck-and-neck all the way through, with just a couple of mistakes towards the end tiltiing it from 34-30 to him, to 34-30 to me, and back again. It's fun, if you're the geeky type.
Right, I'll write properly about othello at some point in the future, and also finish that thought about meerkats. Look forward to it!
... that's weird, I'd got that far into writing when someone posted a comment asking how the final day of the othello went. I must be some kind of future psychic! Maybe I will write about othello tonight after all...
The fun of othello, you see, is analysing your games on WZebra, the computer program that knows everything about othello, after the game. The modern generation of young othelloists immediately pull out their iPhones or whatever and check to see what moves they got right and wrong, whereas old codgers like me wait until they've got home to their old-fashioned laptop computers. It tells me that there wasn't some kind of awesome game-winning move that I missed against Emmanuel C, that in fact we were basically neck-and-neck all the way through, with just a couple of mistakes towards the end tiltiing it from 34-30 to him, to 34-30 to me, and back again. It's fun, if you're the geeky type.
Right, I'll write properly about othello at some point in the future, and also finish that thought about meerkats. Look forward to it!
Saturday, March 02, 2013
Othello!
Othello! I haven't played for so long, I seem to have forgotten how to play badly. Eleven players, so a round robin with eight games today and three tomorrow - my first game, against Emmanuel Caspard, was one of those where I was sure that there must be some clever move that would win it for me by miles and miles, but if there was then I missed it, and ended up losing 34-30. But after that, I went on a sort of unstoppable winning spree, beating Roy, the other Emmanuel, Pierluigi and David Beck, and playing really well (by my standards) in all four games! Then against Stéphane for the first time I got the feeling of not at all knowing what I'm doing, but somehow he took twenty minutes and two seconds to complete the victory (20 minutes on the clocks) and so I won on time, completely undeservedly. Then I had a bye to bring me up to six points from seven rounds - for reference, my rule of thumb is that five and a half points in total from the Cambridge International would be a great achievement, and I've only managed it once before! The final game of the day was a loss to Martin Ødegård, who apart from having a surname full of letters I don't know the ascii codes for had a perfect day, winning eight out of eight. Caspard is second with six and a half, and I'm in third place overnight with six. Woo!
Three games to go tomorrow, against Imre, Arnaud and Borja, all of which I'd expect to lose, but even if I do, the competition has been a great success. I must make a habit of never playing othello, even online, between tournaments!
Three games to go tomorrow, against Imre, Arnaud and Borja, all of which I'd expect to lose, but even if I do, the competition has been a great success. I must make a habit of never playing othello, even online, between tournaments!
Friday, March 01, 2013
The old alma mater
Here I am, back in Cambridge. Depending on whether I went to the Christmas tournament last year (I can't remember), I haven't been here for at least a few months. But I'm breaking away from the tradition of staying in Cityroomz and going with somewhere a great deal cheaper, albeit a much longer walk from the train station. Cityroomz, back when it was Sleeperz, was the really cheap and nice hotel in Cambridge. Nowadays it's the moderately-priced and nice hotel, which is a terrible shame. Nobody wants a moderately-priced and nice hotel, at least not while there are still fairly-cheap and nice hotels around the place!
Anyway, Cambridge International othello tomorrow and Sunday! It's not part of the European Grand Prix this year, so I'm not sure how many Internationals, or even Locals, will be there, but we'll see. I haven't played any othello at all since the last tournament I went to, whichever it was, so I think we can guarantee I'll do badly.
Anyway, Cambridge International othello tomorrow and Sunday! It's not part of the European Grand Prix this year, so I'm not sure how many Internationals, or even Locals, will be there, but we'll see. I haven't played any othello at all since the last tournament I went to, whichever it was, so I think we can guarantee I'll do badly.
Thursday, February 21, 2013
Hello Sam!
While my brother was here, he showed me something he'd found in a charity shop, and asked "Do you remember this book?"
"Not even slightly..." I said, picking it up and looking at it. "OH, GOD, YES!" I exclaimed after opening it up and seeing the Computer Card and Word Displays inside. It's only the best book ever, 'Hello Sam' by Heinz Kurth!
It's about a Solar Automatic Man called Sam, and you communicate with him like this:
Take the Computer Card that comes with the book and put it on top of the appropriate coloured word...
And hey presto, you're having a conversation! Such an ingenious idea, and I really loved it when I first read the book. There's an adventure involving Sam's Booster Box, that makes things grow bigger. And it ends with Sam telling us he's going to the sea for a holiday and that perhaps he'll see us there, but I don't know if there was ever a sequel. I don't know what happened to our original copy of this book, either - we weren't exactly ones to throw things away, but I don't remember seeing it after I was eight or nine. Impressively, this nearly-30-year-old copy still has the Computer Card with it - not necessary, since the book cleverly includes a template for you to make a replacement, but still cool!
"Not even slightly..." I said, picking it up and looking at it. "OH, GOD, YES!" I exclaimed after opening it up and seeing the Computer Card and Word Displays inside. It's only the best book ever, 'Hello Sam' by Heinz Kurth!
It's about a Solar Automatic Man called Sam, and you communicate with him like this:
Take the Computer Card that comes with the book and put it on top of the appropriate coloured word...
And hey presto, you're having a conversation! Such an ingenious idea, and I really loved it when I first read the book. There's an adventure involving Sam's Booster Box, that makes things grow bigger. And it ends with Sam telling us he's going to the sea for a holiday and that perhaps he'll see us there, but I don't know if there was ever a sequel. I don't know what happened to our original copy of this book, either - we weren't exactly ones to throw things away, but I don't remember seeing it after I was eight or nine. Impressively, this nearly-30-year-old copy still has the Computer Card with it - not necessary, since the book cleverly includes a template for you to make a replacement, but still cool!
Monday, February 18, 2013
Thundercats forever!
My brother's just gone back to China, having been staying with me for some time, and one thing we always like to do when we get together is watch Thundercats cartoons - we videoed them when they first came on TV in late 1985, probably because we were out playing in the snow when the first ever episode was on, and have watched them pretty much constantly ever since. Now that the series is available on DVD, of course, other people without our video collection have the ability to watch Thundercats too, but it'll take a heck of a lot of watching before anyone catches up to my and my brother's word-for-word knowledge of everything that happens in every episode.
One thing about the DVDs is that they have the episodes in a weird order. Wikipedia insists that that's the order they were originally broadcast in in the USA, but I personally doubt that. I never saw any website claiming that sequence of episodes until the DVDs came out - there were basically two different episode orders proclaimed by American websites, one of them roughly the same as the British broadcast order, one of them with a few differences. America, of course, is a weird place where different states get different television schedules, so all of the broadcast orders might be correct, but I still suspect the DVDs are just plain wrong.
Anyway, in Britain (the only country that matters), this is how the greatest toy-commercial cartoon of all time first appeared on our screens. If you've got the DVDs, this is the order you must watch them in, okay? With a few incidental notes along the way...
1 Exodus
2 The Unholy Alliance
3 Berbils
4 The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr
5 Trouble With Time
6 Pumm-Ra
7 The Terror of Hammerhand
8 The Tower of Traps
9 The Garden of Delights
This is the end of our first videotape, which our father had inaccurately labelled "Thundercats (30 mins)" - the first episode was shown as a compilation of the first two, and actually lasted 40 minutes or so. Actually, being an old-fashioned E-180 tape, it only had room for eight episodes, but we had the video set to the wrong channel for Pumm-Ra and recorded the snooker on BBC2 instead. So having noticed the problem a week or so later, we taped Tower of Traps on top of it, leaving only a couple of seconds of Willie Thorne and an out-of-sequence videotape to show anything had gone wrong.
But as fate would have it, that's a perfect cut-off point for the first marathon watching session you might like to have - you get the first four world-building episodes and one other by head writer (and best writer in the whole series) Leonard Starr, and the four by Julian P Gardner, with his own somewhat different (but still, mostly, hugely compelling) take on the early days of Thundercats. He disappeared completely after The Garden of Delights (an incoherent and almost completely incomprehensible story that's still strangely fun to watch), leaving the way clear for the golden years of Thundercat adventures...
10 Mandora - The Evil Chaser
11 The Ghost Warrior
12 The Doomgaze
13 Lord of the Snows
14 The Spaceship Beneath the Sands
15 The Time Capsule
16 The Fireballs of Plun-Darr
17 All That Glitters
18 Spitting Image
19 Mongor
20 Return to Thundera
21 Snarf Takes Up the Challenge
22 Mandora and the Pirates
23 The Crystal Queen
24 Safari Joe
25 Return of the Driller
Two more three-hour cassettes full of excitement and adventure! Volume 2 goes up to about half-way through Spitting Image - we were experimenting to see if we could fit nine episodes on a tape, knowing that as good luck would have it Pumm-Ra and Spitting Image were available on a commercially-sold tape, whereas most episodes were never released to the video stores at all. Volume 3 covers the rest, up to the point where Children's BBC stopped showing Thundercats for a good long time.
Virtually all the episodes on volumes 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 were written by the five writers who'd go on to define the cartoon - Leonard Starr (all-round great), Peter Lawrence (script consultant who seemed to be roped in to provide a hasty script whenever someone else had missed a deadline), William Overgard (wrote stories almost exclusively about his own characters, with a Thundercat or two grudgingly included in the margins of the adventure), Bob Haney (with his unmistakeable contraction-free and weird-sounding dialogue) and Stephen Perry (perfectly okay stories without the characteristic quirks of his fellow writers). Well, there's also one by C H Trengove and two by Howard Post in the 'golden age', but the series certainly benefited from the small core of consistently good writers. But then we had to wait a while before volume 4...
26 Turmagar the Tuska
27 Sixth Sense
28 Dr Dometone
29 The Astral Prison
30 Queen of 8 Legs
31 Dimension Doom
32 The Rock Giant
And when it did come back, it was just these seven episodes. All good ones, though, even The Rock Giant, a Peter Lawrence classic with a plot consisting of "a rock giant comes and the Thundercats fight it".
33 Lion-O's Anointment First Day: The Trial of Strength
34 Lion-O's Anointment Second Day: The Trial of Speed
35 Lion-O's Anointment Third Day: The Trial of Cunning
36 Lion-O's Anointment Fourth Day: The Trial of Mind Power
37 Lion-O's Anointment Final Day: The Trial of Evil
Then, later still, we got the Five Trials. This is where American episode guides differ from British ones - the ones that come closest to our order tend to place the Trials earlier in the sequence. The problem is that the final scene features lots of characters who haven't been introduced yet, like Hachiman and Snarfer, which would mean that the Trials have to take place after The Thunder-Cutter and Feliner. On the other hand, Lion-O encounters Acid Lake and the Gaw-Rak-Rak apparently for the first time, which would mean that the Trials take place before Return of the Driller and The Astral Prison... unless he's just got a really bad memory. It's all very confusing.
Anyway, we saw fit to end Volume 5 at this point, since it had the Five Trials on it, although the BBC continued almost immediately with new episodes - almost, since they started with The Rock Giant, apparently unsure whether it had been shown before, and then moved on to...
38 The Thunder-Cutter
39 Mechanical Plague
40 The Demolisher
41 Feliner - Part One
42 Feliner - Part Two
43 Excalibur
44 Secret of the Ice King
45 Sword in a Hole
That's the end of volume 6, and also of the Golden Age Of Thundercats Cartoons. The remaining 20, which didn't get shown until even later, are mainly written by a wide range of one-off jobbing writers, most of whom didn't seem to understand even the basic concepts of the series. I suppose they had to fill out the 65-episode contract somehow, but it's a bit of a dismal end to the show. Our volumes 7 and 8 had to be reconstructed after losing the originals, so I can't completely 100% promise that they were shown in this order, but it was something very close to this, anyway:
46 The Wolfrat
47 Good and Ugly
48 Divide and Conquer
49 The Micrits
50 The Superpower Potion
51 The Evil Harp of Charr-Nin
52 Tight Squeeze
53 Monkian's Bargain
54 Out of Sight
55 Jackalman's Rebellion
56 The Mountain
57 Eye of the Beholder
58 The Mumm-Ra Berbil
59 The Trouble With Thunderkittens
60 Mumm-Rana
61 Trapped
62 The Transfer
63 The Shifter
64 Dream Master
65 Fond Memories
Luckily, that wasn't the end - imagine if your marathon watching-session had to end with Dream Master (possibly the worst episode ever) and Fond Memories (consisting largely of footage from previous episodes, although at least it wasn't a straight "clip show" like some cartoons produce). To get the full British Thundercats-watching experience, you need to watch Thundercats-Ho! The Movie - never shown on TV over here, but available as a video release. It appeared on the shelves before the second half of the first-season episodes had been shown, so you could watch it after The Rock Giant if you want to, but it's best to save it for a finale. Watch the VHS, not the split-into-five-episodes version on the DVD. You haven't got the VHS? I don't know, try eBay or something.
That, however, is the end. While they did make further episodes in America, they never found their way across the Atlantic, and I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. Okay, off you go and watch those DVDs! Relive my childhood!
One thing about the DVDs is that they have the episodes in a weird order. Wikipedia insists that that's the order they were originally broadcast in in the USA, but I personally doubt that. I never saw any website claiming that sequence of episodes until the DVDs came out - there were basically two different episode orders proclaimed by American websites, one of them roughly the same as the British broadcast order, one of them with a few differences. America, of course, is a weird place where different states get different television schedules, so all of the broadcast orders might be correct, but I still suspect the DVDs are just plain wrong.
Anyway, in Britain (the only country that matters), this is how the greatest toy-commercial cartoon of all time first appeared on our screens. If you've got the DVDs, this is the order you must watch them in, okay? With a few incidental notes along the way...
1 Exodus
2 The Unholy Alliance
3 Berbils
4 The Slaves of Castle Plun-Darr
5 Trouble With Time
6 Pumm-Ra
7 The Terror of Hammerhand
8 The Tower of Traps
9 The Garden of Delights
This is the end of our first videotape, which our father had inaccurately labelled "Thundercats (30 mins)" - the first episode was shown as a compilation of the first two, and actually lasted 40 minutes or so. Actually, being an old-fashioned E-180 tape, it only had room for eight episodes, but we had the video set to the wrong channel for Pumm-Ra and recorded the snooker on BBC2 instead. So having noticed the problem a week or so later, we taped Tower of Traps on top of it, leaving only a couple of seconds of Willie Thorne and an out-of-sequence videotape to show anything had gone wrong.
But as fate would have it, that's a perfect cut-off point for the first marathon watching session you might like to have - you get the first four world-building episodes and one other by head writer (and best writer in the whole series) Leonard Starr, and the four by Julian P Gardner, with his own somewhat different (but still, mostly, hugely compelling) take on the early days of Thundercats. He disappeared completely after The Garden of Delights (an incoherent and almost completely incomprehensible story that's still strangely fun to watch), leaving the way clear for the golden years of Thundercat adventures...
10 Mandora - The Evil Chaser
11 The Ghost Warrior
12 The Doomgaze
13 Lord of the Snows
14 The Spaceship Beneath the Sands
15 The Time Capsule
16 The Fireballs of Plun-Darr
17 All That Glitters
18 Spitting Image
19 Mongor
20 Return to Thundera
21 Snarf Takes Up the Challenge
22 Mandora and the Pirates
23 The Crystal Queen
24 Safari Joe
25 Return of the Driller
Two more three-hour cassettes full of excitement and adventure! Volume 2 goes up to about half-way through Spitting Image - we were experimenting to see if we could fit nine episodes on a tape, knowing that as good luck would have it Pumm-Ra and Spitting Image were available on a commercially-sold tape, whereas most episodes were never released to the video stores at all. Volume 3 covers the rest, up to the point where Children's BBC stopped showing Thundercats for a good long time.
Virtually all the episodes on volumes 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 were written by the five writers who'd go on to define the cartoon - Leonard Starr (all-round great), Peter Lawrence (script consultant who seemed to be roped in to provide a hasty script whenever someone else had missed a deadline), William Overgard (wrote stories almost exclusively about his own characters, with a Thundercat or two grudgingly included in the margins of the adventure), Bob Haney (with his unmistakeable contraction-free and weird-sounding dialogue) and Stephen Perry (perfectly okay stories without the characteristic quirks of his fellow writers). Well, there's also one by C H Trengove and two by Howard Post in the 'golden age', but the series certainly benefited from the small core of consistently good writers. But then we had to wait a while before volume 4...
26 Turmagar the Tuska
27 Sixth Sense
28 Dr Dometone
29 The Astral Prison
30 Queen of 8 Legs
31 Dimension Doom
32 The Rock Giant
And when it did come back, it was just these seven episodes. All good ones, though, even The Rock Giant, a Peter Lawrence classic with a plot consisting of "a rock giant comes and the Thundercats fight it".
33 Lion-O's Anointment First Day: The Trial of Strength
34 Lion-O's Anointment Second Day: The Trial of Speed
35 Lion-O's Anointment Third Day: The Trial of Cunning
36 Lion-O's Anointment Fourth Day: The Trial of Mind Power
37 Lion-O's Anointment Final Day: The Trial of Evil
Then, later still, we got the Five Trials. This is where American episode guides differ from British ones - the ones that come closest to our order tend to place the Trials earlier in the sequence. The problem is that the final scene features lots of characters who haven't been introduced yet, like Hachiman and Snarfer, which would mean that the Trials have to take place after The Thunder-Cutter and Feliner. On the other hand, Lion-O encounters Acid Lake and the Gaw-Rak-Rak apparently for the first time, which would mean that the Trials take place before Return of the Driller and The Astral Prison... unless he's just got a really bad memory. It's all very confusing.
Anyway, we saw fit to end Volume 5 at this point, since it had the Five Trials on it, although the BBC continued almost immediately with new episodes - almost, since they started with The Rock Giant, apparently unsure whether it had been shown before, and then moved on to...
38 The Thunder-Cutter
39 Mechanical Plague
40 The Demolisher
41 Feliner - Part One
42 Feliner - Part Two
43 Excalibur
44 Secret of the Ice King
45 Sword in a Hole
That's the end of volume 6, and also of the Golden Age Of Thundercats Cartoons. The remaining 20, which didn't get shown until even later, are mainly written by a wide range of one-off jobbing writers, most of whom didn't seem to understand even the basic concepts of the series. I suppose they had to fill out the 65-episode contract somehow, but it's a bit of a dismal end to the show. Our volumes 7 and 8 had to be reconstructed after losing the originals, so I can't completely 100% promise that they were shown in this order, but it was something very close to this, anyway:
46 The Wolfrat
47 Good and Ugly
48 Divide and Conquer
49 The Micrits
50 The Superpower Potion
51 The Evil Harp of Charr-Nin
52 Tight Squeeze
53 Monkian's Bargain
54 Out of Sight
55 Jackalman's Rebellion
56 The Mountain
57 Eye of the Beholder
58 The Mumm-Ra Berbil
59 The Trouble With Thunderkittens
60 Mumm-Rana
61 Trapped
62 The Transfer
63 The Shifter
64 Dream Master
65 Fond Memories
Luckily, that wasn't the end - imagine if your marathon watching-session had to end with Dream Master (possibly the worst episode ever) and Fond Memories (consisting largely of footage from previous episodes, although at least it wasn't a straight "clip show" like some cartoons produce). To get the full British Thundercats-watching experience, you need to watch Thundercats-Ho! The Movie - never shown on TV over here, but available as a video release. It appeared on the shelves before the second half of the first-season episodes had been shown, so you could watch it after The Rock Giant if you want to, but it's best to save it for a finale. Watch the VHS, not the split-into-five-episodes version on the DVD. You haven't got the VHS? I don't know, try eBay or something.
That, however, is the end. While they did make further episodes in America, they never found their way across the Atlantic, and I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. Okay, off you go and watch those DVDs! Relive my childhood!
Friday, February 15, 2013
The world's foremost cartoon character
Facebook is a funny thing. Yesterday I found myself with invitations to "like" two pages - Dave Farrow's, which asserts that he's "the world's foremost memory expert", and Tansel Ali's, which makes the slightly more modest claim (and, you know, not quite such an outright lie) that he's "one of the leading Memory Experts and Mind Athletes in the world". Facebook probably has hundreds of other pages following the same basic theme.
I don't teach memory courses myself, but this doesn't stop me getting lots and lots of messages on Facebook asking for advice in my capacity as one of the world's other foremost memory experts. And while I know that most of these come from people who don't speak English as a first language, I just can't resist making a slightly rude plea for a bit of basic message etiquette...
Rule 1 - Please don't address me as "Mr Ben". That just sounds silly. As a general rule, don't address anyone British by "Mr" and their first name; that's not how names work. But please also don't call me "Mr Pridmore" (that's my dad) or "Sir" (that's the boss of the Sparky People). "Ben" is fine on its own. Here's a visual guide for anyone who's confused:
Oh, and also please don't call me "Sir Ben", but as far as I know, nobody's ever drawn a picture of someone by that name. Incidentally, I somehow couldn't lay my hands on a Sparky Book this morning, though I know I've got some around here somewhere, so the Sir picture was stolen from this splendid blog which you should all go and read.
Rule 2 - Please don't start your email by saying "this is urgent", "this is very important" and so on. Not if you're asking me how to memorise random numbers, anyway. That really is never important. And do give me a day or two to reply before you follow it up with another note asking if I got the first one. Seriously, I wish I was as keen to improve my memory as some of these people are.
Rule 3 - Don't go into amazingly technical fiddly details of exactly how to visualise your person/action/object images, or whatever, and ask me if you're doing it right, because beyond the very basic principles, all I can do is explain how I do it and tell you that it's different for everyone and you should try different things to see what works for you. And I get tired of typing that, over and over again.
Rule 4 - Please don't assume I'm withholding some kind of super expert memory secret from you if I reply with something like the above. There really isn't a shortcut, you'll just have to work at it, I'm afraid.
Rule 5 - If you ask me for advice on how you can teach your tiny children how to memorise things in order to pass exams and be successful in life, don't be surprised if my advice is to just leave the poor kids alone and stop being such a pushy parent.
Thank you all for your attention
Mr Ben.
I don't teach memory courses myself, but this doesn't stop me getting lots and lots of messages on Facebook asking for advice in my capacity as one of the world's other foremost memory experts. And while I know that most of these come from people who don't speak English as a first language, I just can't resist making a slightly rude plea for a bit of basic message etiquette...
Rule 1 - Please don't address me as "Mr Ben". That just sounds silly. As a general rule, don't address anyone British by "Mr" and their first name; that's not how names work. But please also don't call me "Mr Pridmore" (that's my dad) or "Sir" (that's the boss of the Sparky People). "Ben" is fine on its own. Here's a visual guide for anyone who's confused:
Oh, and also please don't call me "Sir Ben", but as far as I know, nobody's ever drawn a picture of someone by that name. Incidentally, I somehow couldn't lay my hands on a Sparky Book this morning, though I know I've got some around here somewhere, so the Sir picture was stolen from this splendid blog which you should all go and read.
Rule 2 - Please don't start your email by saying "this is urgent", "this is very important" and so on. Not if you're asking me how to memorise random numbers, anyway. That really is never important. And do give me a day or two to reply before you follow it up with another note asking if I got the first one. Seriously, I wish I was as keen to improve my memory as some of these people are.
Rule 3 - Don't go into amazingly technical fiddly details of exactly how to visualise your person/action/object images, or whatever, and ask me if you're doing it right, because beyond the very basic principles, all I can do is explain how I do it and tell you that it's different for everyone and you should try different things to see what works for you. And I get tired of typing that, over and over again.
Rule 4 - Please don't assume I'm withholding some kind of super expert memory secret from you if I reply with something like the above. There really isn't a shortcut, you'll just have to work at it, I'm afraid.
Rule 5 - If you ask me for advice on how you can teach your tiny children how to memorise things in order to pass exams and be successful in life, don't be surprised if my advice is to just leave the poor kids alone and stop being such a pushy parent.
Thank you all for your attention
Mr Ben.
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
What a beautiful day!
The sun's shining! It's warm enough to go out without a coat, just about! You have to chain yourself to the ground so as not to be blown away by the gale-force winds, but it's still starting to feel a bit like spring! Yay!
Meanwhile, an acquaintance last night accused me of calling myself a 'memory athlete' and told me that sounds a bit silly. I of course replied that I never use that expression myself, and think it's a lot silly, but then I looked up the word on that famous source of information-that-might-not-be-true-but-who-cares, Wikipedia, and found that "The word "athlete" is a romanization of the Greek: άθλητὴς, athlētēs, one who participates in a contest; from ἂθλος, áthlos, or ἂθλον, áthlon, a contest or feat."
So it's not necessarily a sporty thing, and we memorisers can quite justifiably call ourselves athletes, and if anyone says we shouldn't, we can just point them to Wikipedia! I'm still not going to call myself a memory athlete, though.
I know that's not nearly as interesting as the genuinely-true fact that 'gymnast' is derived from the Greek word for 'naked', but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Meanwhile, an acquaintance last night accused me of calling myself a 'memory athlete' and told me that sounds a bit silly. I of course replied that I never use that expression myself, and think it's a lot silly, but then I looked up the word on that famous source of information-that-might-not-be-true-but-who-cares, Wikipedia, and found that "The word "athlete" is a romanization of the Greek: άθλητὴς, athlētēs, one who participates in a contest; from ἂθλος, áthlos, or ἂθλον, áthlon, a contest or feat."
So it's not necessarily a sporty thing, and we memorisers can quite justifiably call ourselves athletes, and if anyone says we shouldn't, we can just point them to Wikipedia! I'm still not going to call myself a memory athlete, though.
I know that's not nearly as interesting as the genuinely-true fact that 'gymnast' is derived from the Greek word for 'naked', but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Monday, January 28, 2013
How to be French and clever
If you're a French speaker and want to know what "How To Be Clever" by that Ben Pridmore person was all about, can I suggest that you buy the new French edition - "Comment être génial avec votre mémoire", as translated by Max Parcœur?
I can't offer free emailed versions of this, since the translator wants to make money out of it, but I assure you it's worth buying - it has pictures and everything! Oh, and it's available on Amazon, but if you buy it on Lulu, it gives more money to the writers.
I feel all mercenary now.
I can't offer free emailed versions of this, since the translator wants to make money out of it, but I assure you it's worth buying - it has pictures and everything! Oh, and it's available on Amazon, but if you buy it on Lulu, it gives more money to the writers.
I feel all mercenary now.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Hooray for football
Really, it's not like the ballboy was a tiny helpless infant - he was a hulking great teenager who could probably beat Eden Hazard in a fight. People should be focussing on how rubbish Chelsea are at playing football, not how good they are at kicking small children.
Great final line-up for the League Cup, though - won't exactly do wonders for the cup's image as the trophy that nobody cares about, but it should be a very fun game to watch.
Great final line-up for the League Cup, though - won't exactly do wonders for the cup's image as the trophy that nobody cares about, but it should be a very fun game to watch.
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Online
There are some nice photos of the WMC to be seen here: Photographer Captures The Strain At The ‘World Memory Championships’.
I'm not sure about the inverted commas - they seem to be implying that the competition isn't a real world championship, it just likes to call itself that. And while I'm allowed to constantly imply things like that, I'm a competitor, so it's fine. I'm intolerant of that kind of thing in other people. Still, there's some very nice pictures of the weird goggles and headphones a lot of competitors like to wear, an extremely unflattering shot of me, deep in thought, and down at the bottom of the page an extremely cool one of me with all my packs of cards. The clever photographer has realised that the best way to make me look cool in photos is to cut my head out of the picture.
If you want to take part in a fun memory competition without being worried that the photos will make you look silly, I heartily recommend the Online Memory Challenge! I've been having a Challenge every Saturday at 10:00 GMT, along with the awesome Jonas von Essen and any other memory people who feel like turning up - it's open to everyone and a great training aid! If you want to join in, send an email to simon.orton, at gmail dot com, and he'll give you a link. Come and play!
I'm not sure about the inverted commas - they seem to be implying that the competition isn't a real world championship, it just likes to call itself that. And while I'm allowed to constantly imply things like that, I'm a competitor, so it's fine. I'm intolerant of that kind of thing in other people. Still, there's some very nice pictures of the weird goggles and headphones a lot of competitors like to wear, an extremely unflattering shot of me, deep in thought, and down at the bottom of the page an extremely cool one of me with all my packs of cards. The clever photographer has realised that the best way to make me look cool in photos is to cut my head out of the picture.
If you want to take part in a fun memory competition without being worried that the photos will make you look silly, I heartily recommend the Online Memory Challenge! I've been having a Challenge every Saturday at 10:00 GMT, along with the awesome Jonas von Essen and any other memory people who feel like turning up - it's open to everyone and a great training aid! If you want to join in, send an email to simon.orton, at gmail dot com, and he'll give you a link. Come and play!
Friday, January 18, 2013
Poles apart
My Blogger stats page tells me I've had a lot of pageviews from Poland lately, so I just want to say a big hello, Pole or Poles who've been reading!
It's a bit like the North Pole here today, or at least the way I understand the North Pole to be. There's about an inch of snow out there, and nasty icy remains of the previous snow still underneath it. Good job I hoarded lots of food before it started, because I'm really no good at walking in that kind of stuff.
It's a bit like the North Pole here today, or at least the way I understand the North Pole to be. There's about an inch of snow out there, and nasty icy remains of the previous snow still underneath it. Good job I hoarded lots of food before it started, because I'm really no good at walking in that kind of stuff.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Earth-2
Just a quick primer for those not quite as obsessive about superheroes as I am: Superhero comics were huge in America in the 1940s, nearly died out through lack of interest in the 1950s, then sprang back to life at the end of the fifties when DC Comics launched all-new superheroes named after their Golden Age counterparts, the Flash and the Green Lantern, who had the same basic superpowers but were otherwise entirely different characters.
Soon enough, the DC Universe of superhero comics revealed that the characters from the thirties and forties actually lived on an alternate world, Earth-2, and were still going strong, if a little grey around the temples. The two worlds used to regularly interact in the pages of 1960s comics.
This posed an interesting question for comics fans - Superman and Batman had remained popular enough to be continually in print during the dark days of the fifties, and yet now their comics were depicting the adventures of the Earth-1 versions of the heroes. So, exactly at what point did the comics switch from chronicling Earth-2 to chronicling Earth-1?
I only mention this because, if you're not as obsessive about the Beano as I am, you might not have noticed that the fathers of the central characters have had a makeover recently. The core Beano characters first appeared in the early fifties (the same time that American superheroes were disappearing, funnily enough), and their dads were traditionally bald, grey-haired and decidedly elderly-looking. Perhaps men didn't have children until they were sixty back then, I don't know. But now, in line with parenting habits of the 21st century, Mr The Menace, Mr The Minx and Mr The Dodger have all become much more youthful, with full heads of hair and not a moustache or a wrinkle to be seen on their faces.
The really fun part is in a Dennis The Menace story on the shelves now, when he looks through old photos with his granny, and sees that his dad was exactly like him as a boy (except that his jumper was black and red instead of red and black), AND that his dad's dad looked exactly like the old character model for Dennis's Dad! And even more, that his granddad was also identical to Dennis, during the war! It's fun stuff for the old-time fans. I want to see more adventures of Earth-2 Dennis.
The Bash Street Kids did the same thing many years ago, incidentally - their teacher was called Mr Brown in the fifties, before sliding into just being called Teacher, and then a story in the seventies or eighties revealed that the Kids' parents were all former pupils, and that their teacher was Mr Brown - who made an appearance, aged somewhat but looking like he used to in the olden days. And another Bash Street Kids story around the same time revealed that they all have younger siblings who look exactly like them, just smaller... you could have a lot of fun working out which generation of Beano characters you're reading about at any given time!
The writer deserves praise, whoever it was. Nigel Parkinson was the artist, and he always deserves praise anyway, so unless I hear otherwise I'm going to credit him with all the cleverness.
Soon enough, the DC Universe of superhero comics revealed that the characters from the thirties and forties actually lived on an alternate world, Earth-2, and were still going strong, if a little grey around the temples. The two worlds used to regularly interact in the pages of 1960s comics.
This posed an interesting question for comics fans - Superman and Batman had remained popular enough to be continually in print during the dark days of the fifties, and yet now their comics were depicting the adventures of the Earth-1 versions of the heroes. So, exactly at what point did the comics switch from chronicling Earth-2 to chronicling Earth-1?
I only mention this because, if you're not as obsessive about the Beano as I am, you might not have noticed that the fathers of the central characters have had a makeover recently. The core Beano characters first appeared in the early fifties (the same time that American superheroes were disappearing, funnily enough), and their dads were traditionally bald, grey-haired and decidedly elderly-looking. Perhaps men didn't have children until they were sixty back then, I don't know. But now, in line with parenting habits of the 21st century, Mr The Menace, Mr The Minx and Mr The Dodger have all become much more youthful, with full heads of hair and not a moustache or a wrinkle to be seen on their faces.
The really fun part is in a Dennis The Menace story on the shelves now, when he looks through old photos with his granny, and sees that his dad was exactly like him as a boy (except that his jumper was black and red instead of red and black), AND that his dad's dad looked exactly like the old character model for Dennis's Dad! And even more, that his granddad was also identical to Dennis, during the war! It's fun stuff for the old-time fans. I want to see more adventures of Earth-2 Dennis.
The Bash Street Kids did the same thing many years ago, incidentally - their teacher was called Mr Brown in the fifties, before sliding into just being called Teacher, and then a story in the seventies or eighties revealed that the Kids' parents were all former pupils, and that their teacher was Mr Brown - who made an appearance, aged somewhat but looking like he used to in the olden days. And another Bash Street Kids story around the same time revealed that they all have younger siblings who look exactly like them, just smaller... you could have a lot of fun working out which generation of Beano characters you're reading about at any given time!
The writer deserves praise, whoever it was. Nigel Parkinson was the artist, and he always deserves praise anyway, so unless I hear otherwise I'm going to credit him with all the cleverness.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Other memory competitions are available
Having publicised the Friendly Memory Championship, I feel I should tell you all about the other memory competitions coming up in the next few months.
USA Memory Championship - Saturday March 16, Con Edison building, New York
Only open to US citizens, and apparently only to people over 12 years old too - the usual fun format with an exciting finale on stage in front of the audience. This will be the 16th US championship!
Italian Memory Championship - Friday/Saturday March 22/23, Italy?
I don't know much about this one, if it's still happening. Anyone got the details?
Welsh Memory Championship - Saturday March 30, Llanover, Wales
The fifth Welsh Open - anyone can take part, you don't have to be Welsh. Exactly the same format as the Friendly/Cambridge competition - let Dai know if you're coming, on the Facebook page or with an email.
North German Championship - Saturday April 13, Magdeburg, Germany
Only open to people from the north of Germany, a Regional Standard competition, which means exactly the same as Wales, but without the 15-minute numbers, 10-minute cards or spoken numbers.
South German Championship - Friday/Saturday April 29/30 - Karlsruhe, Germany
Saturday is exactly the same as the North German Championship, but only open to people from the South. However, people from everywhere else can compete on the Friday, with those extra three disciplines, and Saturday both, making it a National Standard, Open championship.
If you believe in long-range planning, there'll be the bigger championships in the summer - Germany in July, UK in August, probably - then Sweden in September, Hong Kong and Australia both planned for that kind of timeframe too, and no doubt a World Championship somewhere, somewhen, later on in the year!
USA Memory Championship - Saturday March 16, Con Edison building, New York
Only open to US citizens, and apparently only to people over 12 years old too - the usual fun format with an exciting finale on stage in front of the audience. This will be the 16th US championship!
Italian Memory Championship - Friday/Saturday March 22/23, Italy?
I don't know much about this one, if it's still happening. Anyone got the details?
Welsh Memory Championship - Saturday March 30, Llanover, Wales
The fifth Welsh Open - anyone can take part, you don't have to be Welsh. Exactly the same format as the Friendly/Cambridge competition - let Dai know if you're coming, on the Facebook page or with an email.
North German Championship - Saturday April 13, Magdeburg, Germany
Only open to people from the north of Germany, a Regional Standard competition, which means exactly the same as Wales, but without the 15-minute numbers, 10-minute cards or spoken numbers.
South German Championship - Friday/Saturday April 29/30 - Karlsruhe, Germany
Saturday is exactly the same as the North German Championship, but only open to people from the South. However, people from everywhere else can compete on the Friday, with those extra three disciplines, and Saturday both, making it a National Standard, Open championship.
If you believe in long-range planning, there'll be the bigger championships in the summer - Germany in July, UK in August, probably - then Sweden in September, Hong Kong and Australia both planned for that kind of timeframe too, and no doubt a World Championship somewhere, somewhen, later on in the year!
Monday, January 14, 2013
Memory Lane Again
The combination of snow here this morning and the squirrel calendar I got for Christmas got me in reminiscent mood about the Austrian Memory Championship 2004. January's picture is a red squirrel in the snow, you see, and the Austrian championship that year gave me the most amazingly pretty scenic view I've ever had from any hotel window before or since - it looked out on a grassy garden leading down to a little group of trees further away, there was a light coat of snow, and a whole lot of red squirrels skipping around and apparently just having fun in the winter weather.
The Austrian Open is a much-missed part of the memory calendar. If you're new to memory competitions (or just have a bad memory), you might not think of Austria as having been a major player, but back in 2004 it certainly was. We'd just had a World Championship with four Austrians in the top ten and two in the top three, and all the talk was about Austria, rather than Germany, being the country poised to put an end to Britain's monopoly on the World Memory Champion title.
The 'buzz' (ie a single brief article on the internet somewhere) about the Austrian championship in November was that it would be a rematch between me and Astrid Plessl after our heroic tussle at the WMC in August, but since I hadn't done any training since then, and neither had Astrid, apparently, it was a bit of a disappointment on that front.
There were in fact two competitions taking place simultaneously in Vienna - an adult and a junior competition. Joachim Thaler, third place in the WMC that year, had reluctantly decided to compete in the latter, which had better prize money and a pretty much guaranteed first place for him, rather than testing himself against the grown-ups - can't really blame him for that, since he did need the money, but it was a shame to lose one of the top contenders.
The scores of the junior championship, for some reason, aren't on either Memocamp or World Memory Statistics - I can only assume we couldn't find them when we were putting the latter website together, but they are in fact still available on the ancient Austrian Championship website, which is still up there on the internet after all these years! Click here for Junior results and Click here for adults - both are pdfs.
My memories of the competition itself aren't actually very clear at all, compared to a lot of competitions. I suspect this had something to do with the beer available to competitors afterwards (possibly it was free, or someone bought it for me, I honestly don't recall), and the presence of Ed Cooke and Lukas Amsüss and their memory-themed challenges. I remember at one point announcing that I'd memorise multiple packs of cards, a long number and drink a pint of beer, all in the space of five minutes. I didn't succeed.
The Junior championship pulled in seventeen young Austrian memorisers from all over the country - Joachim basically took everyone else to the cleaners, but the runner-up was Corinna Draschl, who also did well and is still involved in memory competitions to this day! In fact, the two of them were first and second respectively in almost every discipline.
The Austrian Open, meanwhile, attracted eleven competitors in a very international field. Just the two non-junior Austrians, in Astrid and Lukas, but five Germans - Florian Dellé, Boris Konrad, Ferdinand Krause, Clemens Mayer and Martina Mayer-Lauingen - myself and Ed from England, Idriz Zogaj from Sweden and Trevor Nell all the way from South Africa! That included five of the top ten from the recent world championship, and I'm pretty sure Luise Sommer (10th in the WMC) was there too, but helping to organise the junior competition instead of competing.
We started with the Poem, that much-missed memory discipline that was a lot of fun but admittedly impossible to organize fairly in multiple languages. I had previously been the world's best at that, but Astrid by 2004 was widely acknowldeged as being much, much better than me, so it was a pleasant surprise when she produced a bad score this time and I ended up winning. Lukas missed the first discipline, having overslept - maybe Astrid had a late night too?
In five-minute binary, I broke the world record - in fact, it was announced that I'd got a world-beating score of 810, and I had to hassle Hubert Krenn into going back and checking it, because I knew I'd only written down 780 digits. They were all right, though, and 780 was still considered exceptional, way back then.
Names and faces was won comfortably by Clemens, who'd come fourth in the WMC and seemed seriously committed to doing better in the future - legend has it that he'd been corresponding with Gunther Karsten back in 2003, and said he wasn't ready to enter real competitions, because his scores in practice weren't good enough. Gunther pointed out that the scores he said he'd got were better than almost anyone in the world had achieved before, and that he really should think about actually competing, and the rest is history...
30-minute numbers (this was a strangely non-standard-format competition, half-way between a National Standard and International Standard - regulations were a bit looser back then) was also won by Clemens, with a fairly mind-blowing 1000; I came fourth and was realising that my concentration wasn't what it should have been.
I then totally made a mess of ten-minute cards, only getting one pack right, and then speed numbers, where I got just 163, and with Clemens winning both of those too, I had to admit that I wasn't going to add "Austrian Open Champion" to my list of achievements. This was followed by another terrible performance in 15-minute words, which Astrid won handily - that was another of her specialities. Boris was second, in the discipline he'd soon come to rule the world in.
Clemens also won historic dates, which I was supposed to be far and away the world's best at (at the world championship that year I flabbergasted everyone with an enormous score of 80 - those were the days), following which we had a rather eccentric version of spoken numbers.
Most memory competitions, when asked to provide 100 digits spoken at a rate of one per second, make some kind of recording. This competition had a man reading the numbers from a sheet of paper, while another man looked at his watch and waved his finger once a second to show the other when to speak. I don't remember it being a huge disaster, but nobody got a score higher than 60 in either of the two trials.
Finally we came to speed cards, and Lukas, a real speed cards specialist, did a pack in 35.62 seconds. I think he was one of only four people who had ever broken the 40-seconds barrier at that point - the number four sounds right to me, anyway, though I'm racking my brain and can't think who the other one would have been apart from Lukas, me and Andi Bell. Anyone? Anyway, I was well and truly brain-drained by that point and didn't manage to get a pack correct.
That left Clemens the overall winner by some distance, followed by Astrid, Ed, Boris and me. Lukas was a tiny 35 championship points further adrift in sixth, which means I only just scraped into the prize money places - I took €100 home with me, which only barely made me feel better about losing to Ed and Boris just three months after I'd beaten them by miles in the world championship. But that's what happens when you don't practice - after winning the WMC, my motivation dropped off completely, and it was nearly a whole year before I even picked up a pack of cards at home again!
For Clemens, this was the start of seven consecutive memory competition wins, an unbeaten streak that ran right through 2005 and 2006. For Astrid it was the last competition she entered, although she never properly 'retired' and kept talking about coming back for years thereafter. She was much missed, as was the Austrian Memory Championship - 2004 was the last one, and that burgeoning Austrian dominance of memory sports just sort of fizzled out. It's a shame. I want to go back there and see the squirrels!
The Austrian Open is a much-missed part of the memory calendar. If you're new to memory competitions (or just have a bad memory), you might not think of Austria as having been a major player, but back in 2004 it certainly was. We'd just had a World Championship with four Austrians in the top ten and two in the top three, and all the talk was about Austria, rather than Germany, being the country poised to put an end to Britain's monopoly on the World Memory Champion title.
The 'buzz' (ie a single brief article on the internet somewhere) about the Austrian championship in November was that it would be a rematch between me and Astrid Plessl after our heroic tussle at the WMC in August, but since I hadn't done any training since then, and neither had Astrid, apparently, it was a bit of a disappointment on that front.
There were in fact two competitions taking place simultaneously in Vienna - an adult and a junior competition. Joachim Thaler, third place in the WMC that year, had reluctantly decided to compete in the latter, which had better prize money and a pretty much guaranteed first place for him, rather than testing himself against the grown-ups - can't really blame him for that, since he did need the money, but it was a shame to lose one of the top contenders.
The scores of the junior championship, for some reason, aren't on either Memocamp or World Memory Statistics - I can only assume we couldn't find them when we were putting the latter website together, but they are in fact still available on the ancient Austrian Championship website, which is still up there on the internet after all these years! Click here for Junior results and Click here for adults - both are pdfs.
My memories of the competition itself aren't actually very clear at all, compared to a lot of competitions. I suspect this had something to do with the beer available to competitors afterwards (possibly it was free, or someone bought it for me, I honestly don't recall), and the presence of Ed Cooke and Lukas Amsüss and their memory-themed challenges. I remember at one point announcing that I'd memorise multiple packs of cards, a long number and drink a pint of beer, all in the space of five minutes. I didn't succeed.
The Junior championship pulled in seventeen young Austrian memorisers from all over the country - Joachim basically took everyone else to the cleaners, but the runner-up was Corinna Draschl, who also did well and is still involved in memory competitions to this day! In fact, the two of them were first and second respectively in almost every discipline.
The Austrian Open, meanwhile, attracted eleven competitors in a very international field. Just the two non-junior Austrians, in Astrid and Lukas, but five Germans - Florian Dellé, Boris Konrad, Ferdinand Krause, Clemens Mayer and Martina Mayer-Lauingen - myself and Ed from England, Idriz Zogaj from Sweden and Trevor Nell all the way from South Africa! That included five of the top ten from the recent world championship, and I'm pretty sure Luise Sommer (10th in the WMC) was there too, but helping to organise the junior competition instead of competing.
We started with the Poem, that much-missed memory discipline that was a lot of fun but admittedly impossible to organize fairly in multiple languages. I had previously been the world's best at that, but Astrid by 2004 was widely acknowldeged as being much, much better than me, so it was a pleasant surprise when she produced a bad score this time and I ended up winning. Lukas missed the first discipline, having overslept - maybe Astrid had a late night too?
In five-minute binary, I broke the world record - in fact, it was announced that I'd got a world-beating score of 810, and I had to hassle Hubert Krenn into going back and checking it, because I knew I'd only written down 780 digits. They were all right, though, and 780 was still considered exceptional, way back then.
Names and faces was won comfortably by Clemens, who'd come fourth in the WMC and seemed seriously committed to doing better in the future - legend has it that he'd been corresponding with Gunther Karsten back in 2003, and said he wasn't ready to enter real competitions, because his scores in practice weren't good enough. Gunther pointed out that the scores he said he'd got were better than almost anyone in the world had achieved before, and that he really should think about actually competing, and the rest is history...
30-minute numbers (this was a strangely non-standard-format competition, half-way between a National Standard and International Standard - regulations were a bit looser back then) was also won by Clemens, with a fairly mind-blowing 1000; I came fourth and was realising that my concentration wasn't what it should have been.
I then totally made a mess of ten-minute cards, only getting one pack right, and then speed numbers, where I got just 163, and with Clemens winning both of those too, I had to admit that I wasn't going to add "Austrian Open Champion" to my list of achievements. This was followed by another terrible performance in 15-minute words, which Astrid won handily - that was another of her specialities. Boris was second, in the discipline he'd soon come to rule the world in.
Clemens also won historic dates, which I was supposed to be far and away the world's best at (at the world championship that year I flabbergasted everyone with an enormous score of 80 - those were the days), following which we had a rather eccentric version of spoken numbers.
Most memory competitions, when asked to provide 100 digits spoken at a rate of one per second, make some kind of recording. This competition had a man reading the numbers from a sheet of paper, while another man looked at his watch and waved his finger once a second to show the other when to speak. I don't remember it being a huge disaster, but nobody got a score higher than 60 in either of the two trials.
Finally we came to speed cards, and Lukas, a real speed cards specialist, did a pack in 35.62 seconds. I think he was one of only four people who had ever broken the 40-seconds barrier at that point - the number four sounds right to me, anyway, though I'm racking my brain and can't think who the other one would have been apart from Lukas, me and Andi Bell. Anyone? Anyway, I was well and truly brain-drained by that point and didn't manage to get a pack correct.
That left Clemens the overall winner by some distance, followed by Astrid, Ed, Boris and me. Lukas was a tiny 35 championship points further adrift in sixth, which means I only just scraped into the prize money places - I took €100 home with me, which only barely made me feel better about losing to Ed and Boris just three months after I'd beaten them by miles in the world championship. But that's what happens when you don't practice - after winning the WMC, my motivation dropped off completely, and it was nearly a whole year before I even picked up a pack of cards at home again!
For Clemens, this was the start of seven consecutive memory competition wins, an unbeaten streak that ran right through 2005 and 2006. For Astrid it was the last competition she entered, although she never properly 'retired' and kept talking about coming back for years thereafter. She was much missed, as was the Austrian Memory Championship - 2004 was the last one, and that burgeoning Austrian dominance of memory sports just sort of fizzled out. It's a shame. I want to go back there and see the squirrels!
Friendly Memory Championship 2013
Springtime is the time when people like to get together in a scenic part of the world and have a short, one-day-long memory competition particularly welcoming to beginners, and so I'm pleased to announce that the Friendly Memory Championship is returning to its traditional spot in the schedule in 2013.
The competition will be held in the beautiful surroundings of Attenborough Nature Centre, in Attenborough, near Nottingham, on Sunday 26 May 2013.
Anybody wanting to attend is welcome to stay at my house overnight on Saturday or Sunday - the Monday is a public holiday in Britain, so if you live in this country, you won't need to go to work the next day, probably. There is plenty of other nearby accommodation in Beeston, Attenborough or Chilwell if you want to look for it on the internet - the Rockaway Hotel, just over the road from my place, was heartily recommended by someone who stayed there last year.
The competition will start at 9:00am, promptly, and finish by 6:00pm. It's a rather intense, draining kind of day's work, but there's plenty of opportunity to chat with other memory-competition enthusiasts and have a lot of fun! The entry fee is £30, which includes a hot lunch (very nice hot lunch, at that) at the nature centre - the entry is free to anyone who has never competed at a memory championship before, and the £30 might be significantly reduced for everyone else if we get a lot of people taking part this year (it's to pay for the room hire and expenses, not to make a profit for me!)
The Facebook page contains all the useful information about the event, and is a good place to chat with other people who are coming.
The competition will go something like this...
9:00am - Random Words
You get a sheet of paper with random words on it, and have 5 minutes to memorise them, then you get another sheet of paper with blank spaces, and have 15 minutes to fill in the words you remember. This is the basic format that all ten disciplines follow.
To score points, you need to get a complete column of 20 words all correct - if you have one incorrect word or blank space in a column, you just score 10 for that column; two or more errors or blanks and your score for that column is zero. If a word is correctly remembered but spelt wrong, you only lose the point for that word, so scoring 19 for an otherwise correct column.
For some reason, when I created the slide above, I forgot to make a deliberate spelling mistake, but please just use your imagination and assume that the word with a red 'sp' next to it is somehow spelt wrongly.
For the final column that you fill in, you're allowed to stop part-way down the column and score 1 point for each word (9 points in the above picture). One incorrect word or blank space gives half points for that column, rounded up to the nearest whole number (so it would be 5 points if one of the above was wrong); two or more errors or blanks gives zero points for the column again.
The 'raw score' in each discipline (38 points in the example above) is converted to 'championship points' by comparing it to a standard raw score that gives 1000 championship points - in this case the standard is 125, so a raw score of 38 would give you 304 championship points.
Words can be provided in any language of your choice, provided you ask for translations a month in advance of the competition.
The other nine disciplines work in the same kind of way, so I'll be a bit less wordy in describing them unless the basic principles differ from the ones above.
9:30am - Binary Digits
Ones and noughts - all the number disciplines are arranged in rows rather than columns, but otherwise the same principles apply as in words.
10:00am - Names & Faces
You get a lot of photos of faces, each with a first name and surname underneath it. Then you get the faces in a different order, and have to fill in the names.
There are no rows or columns in this one - you can choose which names to memorise, and each first and last name scores one point. Names will be random and come from any language around the world, not matched to the apparent national origin of the faces or to each other. A picture of me could easily have a name like Baozhong Patel.
Names that are phonetically correct but spelt wrong score half a point, names that are phonetically incorrect but reasonably close to the correct name (three letters different at most) score zero, completely wrong names score minus half a point.
10:30am - 15 Minute Numbers
Just like binary, except these come in rows of 40, rather than 30. There are two 'decimal digits' competitions; this one is the longer version.
11:30am - 10 Minute Cards
Rather than information on paper, you're memorising packs of playing cards here. Then they're recalled on paper, as seen above, by filling in the appropriate number or letter (J, Q, K, A) next to the appropriate suit symbol.
Packs of cards will be provided, although you're welcome to bring your own if you prefer.
12:30pm - Lunch Break
They do really good food there.
1:30pm - 5 Minute Numbers
Exactly like 15 Minute Numbers, only shorter.
2:00pm - Abstract Images
The memorisation paper has lots of rows of five shapes and patterns, as seen above. You have to remember which order they are in, and then fill that in on the recall papers.
3:00pm - Historic Dates
A list of fictional 'historic events' with a year next to them - you have to remember the year and match it to the list of events on the recall paper. As with words, you can ask for a translation into your preferred language.
Again, like names and faces, you can pick and choose which ones to memorise.
3:30pm - Spoken Numbers
This time, instead of reading, you're listening to numbers, spoken at the rate of one digit per second (in English - sorry, only one language available here). Recall is on paper, but you only score up to your first mistake. Two trials - one with 100 digits, and one with 400 - and your best score from the two is what counts.
Scoring is a little unusual here - the championship points you get are 70 times the square root of your raw score.
4:30pm - Speed Cards
Rather than having a time limit to memorise as much as possible, here you're memorising a single pack of cards as quickly as you can (5 minutes maximum). Then you get another pack of cards and have to arrange that into the same sequence as the one you've memorised. Scoring is again weird - the formula is 11170 divided by your time in seconds to the power of 0.75.
And there you have it! Any questions, please post them here!
The competition will be held in the beautiful surroundings of Attenborough Nature Centre, in Attenborough, near Nottingham, on Sunday 26 May 2013.
Anybody wanting to attend is welcome to stay at my house overnight on Saturday or Sunday - the Monday is a public holiday in Britain, so if you live in this country, you won't need to go to work the next day, probably. There is plenty of other nearby accommodation in Beeston, Attenborough or Chilwell if you want to look for it on the internet - the Rockaway Hotel, just over the road from my place, was heartily recommended by someone who stayed there last year.
The competition will start at 9:00am, promptly, and finish by 6:00pm. It's a rather intense, draining kind of day's work, but there's plenty of opportunity to chat with other memory-competition enthusiasts and have a lot of fun! The entry fee is £30, which includes a hot lunch (very nice hot lunch, at that) at the nature centre - the entry is free to anyone who has never competed at a memory championship before, and the £30 might be significantly reduced for everyone else if we get a lot of people taking part this year (it's to pay for the room hire and expenses, not to make a profit for me!)
The Facebook page contains all the useful information about the event, and is a good place to chat with other people who are coming.
9:00am - Random Words
You get a sheet of paper with random words on it, and have 5 minutes to memorise them, then you get another sheet of paper with blank spaces, and have 15 minutes to fill in the words you remember. This is the basic format that all ten disciplines follow.
To score points, you need to get a complete column of 20 words all correct - if you have one incorrect word or blank space in a column, you just score 10 for that column; two or more errors or blanks and your score for that column is zero. If a word is correctly remembered but spelt wrong, you only lose the point for that word, so scoring 19 for an otherwise correct column.
For some reason, when I created the slide above, I forgot to make a deliberate spelling mistake, but please just use your imagination and assume that the word with a red 'sp' next to it is somehow spelt wrongly.
For the final column that you fill in, you're allowed to stop part-way down the column and score 1 point for each word (9 points in the above picture). One incorrect word or blank space gives half points for that column, rounded up to the nearest whole number (so it would be 5 points if one of the above was wrong); two or more errors or blanks gives zero points for the column again.
The 'raw score' in each discipline (38 points in the example above) is converted to 'championship points' by comparing it to a standard raw score that gives 1000 championship points - in this case the standard is 125, so a raw score of 38 would give you 304 championship points.
Words can be provided in any language of your choice, provided you ask for translations a month in advance of the competition.
The other nine disciplines work in the same kind of way, so I'll be a bit less wordy in describing them unless the basic principles differ from the ones above.
9:30am - Binary Digits
Ones and noughts - all the number disciplines are arranged in rows rather than columns, but otherwise the same principles apply as in words.
10:00am - Names & Faces
You get a lot of photos of faces, each with a first name and surname underneath it. Then you get the faces in a different order, and have to fill in the names.
There are no rows or columns in this one - you can choose which names to memorise, and each first and last name scores one point. Names will be random and come from any language around the world, not matched to the apparent national origin of the faces or to each other. A picture of me could easily have a name like Baozhong Patel.
Names that are phonetically correct but spelt wrong score half a point, names that are phonetically incorrect but reasonably close to the correct name (three letters different at most) score zero, completely wrong names score minus half a point.
10:30am - 15 Minute Numbers
Just like binary, except these come in rows of 40, rather than 30. There are two 'decimal digits' competitions; this one is the longer version.
11:30am - 10 Minute Cards
Rather than information on paper, you're memorising packs of playing cards here. Then they're recalled on paper, as seen above, by filling in the appropriate number or letter (J, Q, K, A) next to the appropriate suit symbol.
Packs of cards will be provided, although you're welcome to bring your own if you prefer.
12:30pm - Lunch Break
They do really good food there.
1:30pm - 5 Minute Numbers
Exactly like 15 Minute Numbers, only shorter.
2:00pm - Abstract Images
The memorisation paper has lots of rows of five shapes and patterns, as seen above. You have to remember which order they are in, and then fill that in on the recall papers.
3:00pm - Historic Dates
A list of fictional 'historic events' with a year next to them - you have to remember the year and match it to the list of events on the recall paper. As with words, you can ask for a translation into your preferred language.
Again, like names and faces, you can pick and choose which ones to memorise.
3:30pm - Spoken Numbers
This time, instead of reading, you're listening to numbers, spoken at the rate of one digit per second (in English - sorry, only one language available here). Recall is on paper, but you only score up to your first mistake. Two trials - one with 100 digits, and one with 400 - and your best score from the two is what counts.
Scoring is a little unusual here - the championship points you get are 70 times the square root of your raw score.
4:30pm - Speed Cards
Rather than having a time limit to memorise as much as possible, here you're memorising a single pack of cards as quickly as you can (5 minutes maximum). Then you get another pack of cards and have to arrange that into the same sequence as the one you've memorised. Scoring is again weird - the formula is 11170 divided by your time in seconds to the power of 0.75.
And there you have it! Any questions, please post them here!
Sunday, January 13, 2013
WARM winter ahead!
All of the newspapers are proclaiming that it's going to be freezing cold and snowy and kill everyone (Yahoo news included the phrase "nobody in the UK is safe," which seems a teensy bit melodramatic), but they all said the same thing last winter, which turned out to be really mild.
Consequently, I no longer believe anything that the news says about winter weather, and I'm going to wander around outside in just my pants. If I get hypothermia, it's entirely the fault of the media.
Consequently, I no longer believe anything that the news says about winter weather, and I'm going to wander around outside in just my pants. If I get hypothermia, it's entirely the fault of the media.
Friday, January 11, 2013
Daytime TV
Deal Or No Deal was really really great today; he took out the whole power five in the first two rounds, but rallied right at the end to take home £15,000!
Yes, I need a job.
Yes, I need a job.
Saturday, January 05, 2013
New look
I still haven't watched the whole of Britain's Brightest, but it got me thinking about a change of appearance. I always do these things in my normal scruffy clothes, unless the TV show specifically orders me to wear a big black cloak, but I can't help thinking that this particular one would have worked better if I was wearing something a bit fancy. Most of what I said was scripted, which is my excuse for any bits that sounded horribly unnatural, but judging by what the script said, I think they were expecting a slightly more flamboyantly eccentric kind of "memory expert"...
I've always wondered what it would be like to wear a suit that fits me - even when I'm being an accountant, I wear a tatty old thing like a scarecrow with an office job might - so should I maybe splash out and get one? Maybe go all Doctor Who and wear a bow tie? I just fancy the idea of making a change and being eccentric in a way that doesn't involve appearing on TV in a jumper that I've had since I was sixteen. Any suggestions?
I've always wondered what it would be like to wear a suit that fits me - even when I'm being an accountant, I wear a tatty old thing like a scarecrow with an office job might - so should I maybe splash out and get one? Maybe go all Doctor Who and wear a bow tie? I just fancy the idea of making a change and being eccentric in a way that doesn't involve appearing on TV in a jumper that I've had since I was sixteen. Any suggestions?
Anyone see it?
I just got a call to say I was on "Britain's Brightest", and turned it on just in time to see the last couple of seconds of the bit with me on. Sorry I didn't give my many fans a warning, but I don't think it was really worth seeing. The quiz/game bit that's on after me looks like a lot of fun, though! Find four-letter words in a grid while mentally estimating 27 seconds - that was just brilliantly original!
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